FreeNAS

I have been tossing around some ideas lately regarding Storage.

Having recently reduced the amount of IT equipment in our house myself and my wife are now down to using only laptops (she has 1 while I currently have 3) and we need a good backup/storage solution.  I have a dislike of simple external drives just because they always need to be with you.  So I have been looking at NAS solutions.  The price of these devices have fallen to the point that you can easy have a Terabyte of storage for less than £200.

Then I came across this article about FreeNAS a FreeBSD based OS that is designed to turn old computers into NAS storage devices. It supports all types of hardrive and can even run from a USB key.  So with the addition of a big drive I could tuck one of my old machines in the shed or a cupboard with a wireless card and create my NAS drive.

KDE 4.2 Is Out.

KDE 4.2 is out.....so grab the packages and have some fun.

"The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "The Answer", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.0), readying the Free Desktop for end users."

Final Lenny Update For KDE 4.1

Ana has blogged that the final update to the Lenny Backports for KDE 4.1 has been made.

However, KDE 4.2 is going into experimental within the near future.

SQL - Get Time From datetime Without Seconds.

LEFT(Convert(varchar, fldDate, 8), 5)

The above seems to be about the best way to return the time portion from a datetime field if you need to remove the seconds.

There has to be a neater way of doing it....anyone?

The Sandcastle Project.

Sandcastle is a project that started life on Codeplex. It's a Microsoft application for generating MSDN documentation from XML comments.

It is Rubbish!

That's not a statement I make blindly but after trying to get it to work (on and off for about a year). All the application does (at a high level) is take the xml documentation output file generated by Visual Studio during a build and create MSDN style documentation (both web based and compiled help file).

This should just be a case of applying a xslt file and job done.

Oh no.... not Sandcastle. Sandcastle takes around 20 minutes to generate the help file for a small utility application. Last time I attemptted to to build documentation for our main application on a build machine that we use (i.e. nothing and no-one else on it used solely for building software) it crashed to to maxing out the Ram (1gb).

There is an interesting article about the current state of the project here. To sum up the article ... the application is not worthy of using in a serious build environment.

If anyone has got it working I would be interested to find out more.

The story of a girl with Ubuntu

So having been busy for the last few days with work I had not seen this story which had taken the net by storm.

The story was about a young girl that brought a laptop from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed and found she couldn't set up her wireless modem or install MS Word and therefore, was unable to complete an on-line college course.

On reading it kinda smacked of a story written by a MS employee.

And then someone added it to digg and the Linux world and their wife torn the article, the author and the girl to pieces.

Most of the comments were aimed at the clearly under researched article and the technical inadequacies but some fools attacked the young lady. I myself feel that this is __NOT__ the kind of image that I want associated with Linux. No matter how we feel about someone that has found Linux not to their taste for what ever reason we should learn something from them and not instult them.

Qt 4.5 To Be Released Under LGPL

Nokia has announced that from version 4.5 Qt will be released under the LGPL.

The article on dot.kde.org has the full details.